OSX – BasRaayman's Technical Take

Recently my parents switched to a Mac from a PC, and I helped set things up for them. The machine was quite nice, a new iMac Retina, and I helped my dad migrate their old PC to a VM on the new Mac. Now, this entire process is pretty straightforward. You put the Mac and the PC on the same network, input a four digit token (or input an IP and port), then authenticate with a user and password, and things should work.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case for me. The Windows system wanted to have UAC disable on the Windows 8 Machine, which isn’t a problem, but the error message wouldn’t go away. Problem was, that it was a pretty generic error message “A failure occurred”, without even so much as an error code that made any sense. The log files also didn’t work.

While I was guessing it might be related to a username problem (spaces in the username), I tried several things on the Windows side, and checked the user on the Mac as well. It was then I found out that under OSX Mavericks, you can now enable using an iCloud password, which was already set up (using a screenshot here of my MacBook Pro as an example):

Long story short, as soon as I used a separate local password for the user, the P2V migration worked like a charm. I enabled the iCloud password again, and the migration wouldn’t go through. Since I wasn’t able to find this in the VMware KB, I figured I might as well share this here.

After being on the road in a high speed train without any WLAN connection, I decided to do some searching on how to set up my BlackBerry as modem. Since the current firmware on my BlackBerry 9700 seems to have a somewhat flaky Bluetooth stack (currently I’m running on firmware v5.0.0.545) I wanted to do this via USB, but most of the settings should be the same for a device connected via Bluetooth.

One note should be made, and that is that I set this up for a connection on T-Mobile Germany, so the settings are most likely different for your provider, but this might give you a rough idea on how to set up everything. So let’s get started:

Start by downloading the BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac. Right now you should be able to get a copy of it right here.
Install the software and connect your BlackBerry to it. The steps here should be pretty self explanatory.
Now, open your network preferences. To do so, go to “System Preferences” and click on “Network”, which can be found in the row with the header “Internet & Wireless”.
You should find a new device there called “RIM Composite Device”. If it’s not there, click on the plus sign at the lower left, and select the “RIM Composite Device” from the “Interface” drop down list. You can give it any name, for example “BlackBerry USB Internet Connection” might be a name that gives you a better idea of what this is. Then click on the “create” button.
Now, for the telephone number you will enter “*99#” (without the quotes). If you were setting up dial-in info on your BlackBerry, you would also use this as the dial-in number, and you would need to alter the number to tell your smartphone about the APN it should use. You could enter “*99*1#” or “*99***1#,” to force it to use the first APN, or you could use “*99*4#” or “*99***4#,” to make it use the fourth entry. But in my case I just went with the first one and used the short form of “*99#”.
You can enter anything you want as a user name and password, but the fields can not be left blank. I used “tm” in my setup.
Once you have done that, you can click on the “Advanced” button and go to the tab “Modem”. There, change the “Vendor” to “Research in Motion”, and select “Blackberry IP Modem (CDMA)” as the model.
Leave the CID as it is (it should be “1”), and enter “internet.t-mobile” or “dynamic” as the APN.
Click on the tab “DNS” and enter “193.254.160.1” as the DNS server.
Go to the tab “PPP” and deselect all of the checks.
Now, click on “OK” and after that select “Save”.

Now, you should be able to connect to the internet using your phone. You can check the “Show modem in status in menu bar” to have a small phone symbol at the top menu bar to make it easier to track the status of your connection, and make it slightly easier to connect and disconnect your connection.

Two small notes to finish up this short. One, these are the settings that worked for me. If you are not in Germany, it’s likely that you would need to change the APN, DNS server and username/password to correspond with the carrier you are using. Also, it is possible that some of the settings made under “PPP” could be different and the connections still works. These are just my settings that I wanted to share.

Second, check your data plan!. Surfing via your phone is no problem once you get the connection up and running, but your data usage may accumulate quicker than you initially thought, and exceeding the amount of data in your plan could get expensive really quickly.

Last but not least: Let me know if this works for you, or if it doesn’t and you managed to get it working in a different way, let me know about it and I’ll make sure that I update the post.